Is Turkey Ready for Global Network in the Perspective of European Union?

Abstract

While the European Union, was initially founded as an association for economic purposes, now it tends to be a common information society and wants to transform the economic structure of the Union in the perspective of knowledge economy. World Economic Forum derived the networked readiness index which consists four sub-indices as environment, preparation, usage and impact sub-indices, with the aim of using it in evaluating the levels of development of the countries in transforming themselves into information societies. In this study, we primarily evaluated the positions of Turkey and the countries of European Union within the scope of the networked readiness index, then we evaluated their positions according to the impact sub-index. Impact sub-index can be separated into two groups both including four different sub-indices as economic and social ones. In our study we preferred to use clustering analysis which is one of the multivariate statistical techniques and employed a non-hierarchical clustering analysis named k-means technique. According to the networked readiness index, Finland was in the best position and followed by Sweden, UK, Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg and Netherlands. Turkey took part in the bottom cluster, along with other European Union countries. On the other hand according to the impact sub-index, while Turkey was found to be in the moderate position among the European Union Countries, Sweden, UK, Malta, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Poland, Estonia and Finland were in the best position.